c++

I’ve just tagged v1.0 of Repoint, a tool for managing library source code in a development project. Conceptually it sits somewhere between Mercurial/Git submodules and a package manager like npm. It is intended for use with languages or environments that don’t have a favoured package manager, or in situations where the dependent libraries themselves aren’t aware that they are being package-managed. Essentially, situations where you want, or need, to be a bit hands-off from any actual package manager. I use it for projects in C++ and SML among other things.

Like npm, Bundler, Composer etc., Repoint refers to a project spec file that you provide that lists the libraries you want to bring in to your project directory (and which are brought in to the project directory, not installed to a central location). Like them, it creates a lock file to record the versions that were actually installed, which you can commit for repeatable builds. But unlike npm et al, all Repoint actually does is clone from the libraries’ upstream repository URLs into a subdirectory of the project directory, just as happens with submodules, and then report accurately on their status compared with their upstream repositories later

The expected deployment of Repoint consists of copying the Repoint files into the project directory, committing them along with everything else, and running Repoint from there, in the manner of a configure script — so that developers generally don’t have to install it either. It’s portable and it works the same on Linux, macOS, or Windows. Things are not always quite that simple, but most of the time they’re close.

At its simplest, Repoint just checks stuff out from Git or whatever for you, which doesn’t look very exciting. An example on Windows:

Simple though Repoint’s basic usage is, it can run things pretty rigorously across its three supported version-control systems (git, hg, svn), it gets a lot of annoying corner cases right, and it is solid, reliable, and well-tested across platforms. The README has more documentation, including of some more advanced features.

Is this of any use to me?

Repoint might be relevant to your project if all of the following apply:

You are developing with a programming language or environment that has no obvious single answer to the “what package manager should I use?” question; and

Your code project depends on one or more external libraries that are published in source form through public version-control URLs; and

You can’t assume that a person compiling your code has those libraries installed already; and

You don’t want to copy the libraries into your own version-control repo to form a Giant Monorepo; and

Most of your dependent libraries do not similarly depend on other libraries (Repoint doesn’t support recursive dependencies at all).

Beyond mere relevance, Repoint might be actively useful to your project if any of the following also apply:

The libraries you’re using are published through a mixture of version-control systems, e.g. some use Git but others Mercurial or Subversion; or

The libraries you’re using and, possibly, your own project might change from one version-control system to another at some point in the future.

Example

The biggest current example of a project using Repoint is Sonic Visualiser. If you check out its code from Github or from the SoundSoftware code site and run its configure script, it will call out to repoint install to get the necessary dependencies. (On platforms that don’t use the configure script, you have to run Repoint yourself.)

Note that if you download a Sonic Visualiser source code tarball, there is no reference to Repoint in it and the Repoint script is never run — Repoint is very much an active-developer tool, and it includes an archive function that bundles up all the dependent libraries into a tarball so that people building or deploying the end result aren’t burdened with any additional utilities to use.

I also use Repoint in various smaller projects. If you’re browsing around looking at them, note that it wasn’t originally called Repoint — its working title in earlier versions was vext and I haven’t quite finished switching the repos over. Those earlier versions work fine of course, they just use different words.

Convolutional neural networks (or convnets or CNNs) are a staple of “deep learning”. There are many tutorials available that describe what they do, either mathematically or via quasi-mystical appeals to intuition, and introduce how to train and use them, often with image classification examples.

This post has a narrower focus. As a programmer, I am happy processing floating-point data in languages like C++, but I’m more likely to be building applications with pre-trained models than training new ones. Say I have a pre-trained convnet image classifier, and I use it to carry out a single classification of one image (“tell me whether this shows a pig, cow, or sheep”) — what does that actually mean, in terms of code?

I’ll go through an example in the form of a small hand-written C++ convolutional net that contains only the “execution” code, no training logic. It will be very much an illustrative implementation, not production code. It will use pre-trained data adapted from a similar model in Keras, on which more later.

The specific example I am using is a typical image classification one: identifying which of five types of flower is visible in a small colour image (inspired by this tutorial). All the code I’m describing can be found in this Github repository.

Networks, layers, weights, training

A network in this context is a pipeline of functions through which data is passed, with the output of each function going directly to the input of the next one. Each of these functions is known as a layer.

Our example will begin by supplying the image data as input to the first layer, and end with the final layer returning a set of five numbers, one for each kind of flower the network knows about, indicating how likely the network thinks it is that the image shows that kind of flower.

So to run one classification, we just have to get the image data into the right format and pass it through each layer function in turn, and out pops the network’s best guess.

The layers themselves perform some mathematical operation on the data. Some of them do so by making use of a set of other values, provided separately, which they might multiply with the inputs in some way (in which case they are known as weights) or add to the return values (known as biases).

Coming up with suitable weight and bias values for these layers is what training is for. To train a network, the weights and biases for each such layer are randomly initialised, then the network is repeatedly run to provide classifications of known inputs; each of the network’s guesses is compared with the known class of the input, and the weights and biases of the network are updated depending on how accurate the classification was. Eventually, with luck, they will converge on some reliable values. Training is both difficult and tedious, so here we will happily leave it to machine-learning researchers.

These trainable layers are then typically sandwiched by fixed layers that provide non-linearities (also known as activation functions) and various data-manipulation bits and bobs like max-pooling. More on these later.

The layers are pure functions: a layer with a given set of weights and biases will always produce the same output for a given input. This is not always true within recurrent networks, which model time-varying data by maintaining state in the layers, but it is true of classic convolutional nets.

Our example network

This small network consists of four rounds of convolution + max-pooling layers, then two dense layers.

I constructed and trained this using Keras (in Python) based on a “flower pictures” dataset downloaded from the Tensorflow site, with 5 labelled classes of flowers. My Github repository contains a script obtain-data.sh which downloads and prepares the images, and a Python program with-keras/train.py which trains this network on them and exports the trained weights into a C++ file. The network isn’t a terribly good classifier, but that doesn’t bother me here.

I then re-implemented the model in C++ without using a machine-learning library. Here’s what the pipeline looks like. This can be found in the file flower.cpp in the repository. All of the functions called here are layer functions defined elsewhere in the same file, which I’ll go through in a moment. The variables with names beginning weights_ or biases_ are the trained values exported from Keras. Their definitions can be found in weights.cpp.

Many functions are used for more than one layer — for example we have a single convolve function used for four different layers, with different weights, bias values, and input shapes each time. This reuse is possible because layer functions don’t retain any state from one call to the next.

You can see that we pass the original image as input to the first layer, but subsequently we just take the return value from each function and pass it to the next one. These values have types that we are expressing as nested vectors of floats. They are all varieties of tensor, on which let me digress for a moment:

Tensors

For our purposes a tensor is a multidimensional array of numbers, in our case floats, of which vectors and matrices are special cases. A tensor has a shape, which we can write as a list of sizes, and the length of that list is the rank. (The word dimension can be ambiguous here and I’m going to try to avoid it… apart from that one time I used it a moment ago…)

Examples:

A matrix is a rank-2 tensor whose shape has two values, height and width. The matrix has shape [2, 3], if we are giving the height first.

A C++ vector of floats is a rank-1 tensor, whose shape is a list of one value, the number of elements in the vector. The vector { 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 } has the shape [3].

A single number can also be considered a tensor, of rank 0, with shape [].

All of the values passed to and returned from our network layer functions are tensors of various shapes. For example, a colour image will be represented as a tensor of rank 3, as it has height, width, and a number of colour channels.

In this code, we are storing tensors using C++ vectors (for rank 1), vectors of vectors (for rank 2), and so on. This is transparent, makes indexing easy, and allows us to see the rank of each tensor directly from its type.

Production C++ frameworks don’t do it this way — they typically store tensors as values interleaved into a single big array, wrapped up in a tensor class that knows how to index into it. With such a design, unlike our code, all tensors will have the same C++ class type regardless of their rank.

There is a practical issue with the ordering of tensor indices. Knowing the shape of a tensor is not enough: we also have to know which index is which. For example, an RGB image that is 128 pixels square has shape [128, 128, 3] if we index the height, width, and colour channels in that order, or [3, 128, 128] if we separate out the individual colour channels and index them first. Unfortunately, both layouts are in common use. Keras exposes the choice through a flag and uses the names channels_last for the former layout, historically the default in Tensorflow as it often runs faster on CPUs, and channels_first for the latter, used by many systems as it parallelises better with GPUs. The code in this example uses channels_last ordering.

This definition of a tensor is good enough for us, but in mathematics a tensor is not just an array of numbers but an object that sits in an algebraic space and can be manipulated in ways intrinsic to that space. Our data structures make no attempt to capture this, just as a C++ vector makes no effort to capture the properties of a mathematical vector space.

Layers used in our model

Each layer function takes a tensor as input, which I refer to within the function as in. Trained layers also take further tensors containing the weights and biases for the layer.

The weights for this layer, supplied in a rank-4 tensor, define a set of convolution kernels (or filters). Each kernel is a rank-3 tensor, width-height-depth. For each pixel in the input, and for each channel in the colour depth, the kernel values for that channel are multiplied by the surrounding pixel values, depending on the width and height of the kernel, and summed into a single value which appears at the same location in the output. We therefore get an output tensor containing a matrix of (almost) the same size as the input image, for each of the kernels.

(Note for audio programmers: FFT-based fast convolution is not generally used here, as it works out slower for small kernels)

Vaguely speaking, this has the effect of transforming the input into a space determined by how much each pixel’s surroundings have in common with each of the learned kernel patterns, which presumably capture things like whether pixels have a common colour or whether there is common activity between a pixel and neighbouring pixels in a particular direction due to edges or lines in the image.

Usually the early convolution layers in an image classifier will explode the amount of data being passed through the network. In our small model, the first convolution layer takes in a 128×128 image with 3 colour channels, and returns a 128×128 output for each of 32 learned kernels: nearly ten times as much data, which will then be reduced gradually through later layers. But fewer weight values are needed to describe a convolution layer compared with the dense layers we’ll see later in our network, so the size of the trained layer (what you might call the “code size”) is relatively smaller.

I said above that the output matrices were “almost” the same size as the input. They have to be a bit smaller, as otherwise the kernel would overrun the edges. To allow for this, we precede the convolution layer with a…

Zero-padding layer

This can be found in the zeroPad function. It creates a new tensor filled with zeros and copies the input into it:

All this does is add a zero-valued border around all four edges of the image, in each channel, in order to make the image sufficiently bigger to allow for the extent of the convolution kernel.

Most real-world implementations of convolution layers have an option to pad the input when they do the convolution, avoiding the need for an explicit zero-padding step. In Keras for example the convolution layers have a padding parameter that can be either valid (no extra padding) or same (provide padding so the output and input sizes match). But I’m trying to keep the individual layer functions minimal, so I’m happy to separate this out.

Activation layer

Again, this is something often carried out in the trained layers themselves, but I’ve kept it separate to simplify those.

This introduces a non-linearity by applying some simple mathematical function to each value (independently) in the tensor passed to it.

Historically, for networks without convolution layers, the activation function has usually been some kind of sigmoid function mapping a linear input onto an S-shaped curve, retaining small differences in a critical area of the input range and flattening them out elsewhere.

The activation function following a convolution layer is more likely to be a simple rectifier. This gives us the most disappointing acronym in all of machine learning: ReLU, which stands for “rectified linear unit” and means nothing more exciting than

if (x <0.0) {
x =0.0;
}

applied to each value in the tensor.

We have a different activation function right at the end of the network: softmax. This is a normalising function used to produce final classification estimates that resemble probabilities summing to 1:

Max pooling layer

The initial convolution layer increases the amount of data in the network, and subsequent layers then reduce this into a smaller number of hopefully more meaningful higher-level values. Max pooling is one way this reduction happens. It reduces the resolution of its input in the height and width axes, by taking only the maximum of each NxM block of pixels, for some N and M which in our network are both always 2.

Why? Because that’s what the following dense layer expects as its input. By this point we are saying that we have used as much of the structure in the input as we’re going to use, to produce a set of values that we now treat as individual features rather than as a structure.

With a library that represents tensors using an interleaved array, this will be a no-op, apart from changing the nominal rank of the tensor.

Dense layer

A dense or fully-connected layer is an old-school neural network layer. It consists of a single matrix multiplication, multiplying the input vector by the matrix of learned weights, then a vector addition of bias values. From our dense function:

Our network has two of these layers, the second of which produces the final prediction values.

That’s pretty much it for the code. There is a bit of boilerplate around each function, and some extra code to load in an image file using libpng, but that’s about all.

There is one other kind of layer that appears in the original Keras model: a dropout layer. This doesn’t appear in our code because it is only used while training. It discards a certain proportion of the values passed to it as input, something that can help to make the following layer more robust to error when trained.

Further notes

Precision and repeatability

Training a network is a process that involves randomness. A given model architecture can produce quite different results on separate training runs.

This is not the case when running a trained network to make a classification or prediction. Two implementations of a network that both use the same basic arithmetic datatypes (e.g. 32-bit floats) should produce the same results when given the same set of trained weights and biases. If you are trying to reproduce a network’s behaviour using a different library or framework, and you have the same trained weights to use with both implementations, and your results look only “sort of” similar, then they’re probably wrong.

The differences between implementations in terms of channel ordering and indexing can be problematic in this respect. Consider the convolution function with its seven nested for-loops. Load any of those weights with the wrong index or in the wrong order and of course it won’t work, and there are a lot of possible permutations there. There seems to be more than one opinion about how kernel weights should be indexed, for example, and it’s easy to get them upside-down if you’re converting from one framework to another.

Should I use code like this in production?

Probably not!

First and most trivially, this isn’t a very efficient arrangement of layers. Separating out the zero-padding and activation functions means more memory allocation and copying.

Second, there are many ways to speed up the expensive brute-force layers (that is, the convolution and dense layers) dramatically even on the CPU, using vectorisation, careful cache and memory management, and faster matrix and convolution algorithms. If you don’t take advantage of these, you’re wasting time for no purpose; if you do, you’re repeating work other people are doing in libraries already.

I adapted the example network to use the tiny-dnn header-only C++ library, and it ran roughly twice as fast as the code above. (I’m a sucker for libraries named tiny-something, even if, as in this case, they are no longer all that tiny.) That version of the example code can be found in the with-tiny-dnn directory in the repo. It’s ugly, because I had to load and convert the weights from a system that uses channels-last format into one that expects channels-first. But I only had to write that code once, and it wouldn’t have been necessary if I’d trained the model in a channels-first layout. I might also have overlooked some simpler way to do it.

Third, this approach is fragile in the face of changes to the model architecture, which have to be duplicated exactly across the model implementation and the separately-loaded weights. It would be preferable to load the model architecture into your program, rather than load the weights into a hand-written architecture. To this end it seems to make sense to use a library that supports importing and exporting models automatically.

All this said, I find it highly liberating to realise that one could just sketch out these few lines of code and have a working result.

I’ve spent the last couple of days at the 2017 Audio Developer Conference organised by ROLI. This is a get-together and technical conference for people who work on audio software and software-driven-hardware, in practice mostly people working on music applications.

I don’t go to many conferences these days, despite working in academia. I don’t co-write many papers and I’m no longer funded by a project with a conference budget. I’ve been to a couple that we hosted ourselves at the Centre for Digital Music, but I think the last one I went to anywhere else was the 2014 Linux Audio Conference in Karlsruhe. I don’t mind this situation (I don’t like to travel away from my family anyway), I just mention it to give context for why a long-time academic employee like me should bother to write up a conference at all!

Here are my notes — on things I liked and things I didn’t — in roughly chronological order.

The venue is interesting, quite fancy, and completely new to me. (It is called CodeNode.) I’m a bit boggled that there is such a big space right in the middle of the City given over to developer events. I probably shouldn’t be boggling at that any more, but I can’t help it.
Nice furniture too.

The attendees are amazingly homogeneous. I probably wouldn’t have even noticed this, back when I was tangentially involved in the commercial audio development world, as I was part of the homogeneity. But our research group is a fair bit more diverse and I’m a bit more perceptive now. From the attendance of this event, you would conclude that 98% of audio developers are male and 90% are white people from northern Europe.
When I have been involved in organising events in academia, we have found it hard to get a speaker lineup that is as diverse as the population of potential attendees (i.e. the classic all-male panel problem). I have failed badly at this, even when trying hard — I am definitely part of the problem when it comes to conference organisation. Here, though, my perception is the other way around: the speakers are a closer reflection of what I perceive as the actual population than the attendees are.

Talks I went to:

Day 2 (i.e. the first day of the talks):

The future is wide: SIMD, vector classes and branchless algorithms for audio synthesis by Angus Hewlett of FXpansion (now employed by ROLI). A topic I’m interested in and he has clearly done solid work on (see here), but it quickly reached the realms of tweaks I personally am probably never going to need. The most heartening lesson I learned was that compilers are getting better and better at auto-vectorisation.

Exploring time-frequency space with the Gaborator by Andreas Gustafsson. I loved this. It was about computing short-time constant-Q transforms of music audio and presenting the results in an interactive way. This is well-trodden territory: I have worked on more than one implementation of a constant-Q transform myself, and on visualising the results. But I really appreciated his dedication to optimising the transform (which appears to be quicker and more invertible than my best implementation) and his imagination in rendering it (reusing the Leaflet mapping API to display time-frequency “maps”). There is a demo of this here and I like it a lot.
So I was sitting there thinking “yes! nice work!”, but when it came to the questions, it was apparent that people didn’t really get how nice it was. I wanted to pretend to ask a question, just in order to say “I like it!”. But I didn’t, and then I never managed to work up to introducing myself to Andreas afterwards. I feel bad and I wish I had.

The development of Ableton Live by Friedemann Schautz. This talk could only disappoint, after its title. But I had to attend anyway. It was a broad review of observations from the development of Live 10, and although I didn’t learn much, I did like Friedemann and thought I would happily work on a team he was running.

The amazing usefulness of band-limited impulse trains by Stefan Stenzel of Waldorf. This was a nice old-school piece. Who can resist an impulse train? Not I.

Some interesting phenomena in nonlinear oscillators by André Bergner of Native Instruments. André is a compelling speaker who uses hand-drawn slides (I approve) and this was a neat mathematical talk, though I wasn’t able to stay to the end of it.

Day 3 (second and final day of talks):

The human in the musical loop (keynote) by Elaine Chew. Elaine is a professor in my group and I know some of her work quite well, but her keynote was exactly what I needed at this time, first thing in the morning on the second day. After a day of bits-driven talks, this was a piece about performers and listeners from someone who is technologically adept herself, and curious, but talks about music first. Elaine is also very calm, which was useful when the projector hardware gave up during her talk and stopped working for a good few minutes. I think as a result she had to hurry the closing topic (about the heartbeat project) which was a pity, as it could have been fascinating to have expanded on this a bit more.
Some of what Elaine talked about was more than a decade old, and I think this is one of the purposes of professors: to recall, and to be able to communicate, relevant stuff that happened longer ago than any current research student remembers.

The new C++17, and why it is good for you by Timur Doumler. The polar opposite of Elaine’s talk, but I was now well-cushioned for it. C++17 continues down the road of simplifying the “modern-language” capabilities C++ has been acquiring since C++11. Most memorable for me are destructuring bind, guaranteed copy elision on value return, variant types, and filesystem support in the standard library.
Destructuring bind is interesting and I’ve written about it separately.

The use of std::variant in realtime DSP by Ian Hobson. A 50-minute slot, for a talk about which Timur Doumler’s earlier talk had already given away the twist! (Yes you can use std::variant, it doesn’t do any heap allocation.) Ambitious. This was a most satisfying talk anyway, as it was all about performance measurements and other very concrete stuff. No mention of the Expression Problem though.

Reactive Extensions (Rx) in JUCE by Martin Finke. I have never used either React or JUCE so I thought this would be perfect for me. I had a question lined up: “What is JUCE?” but I didn’t dare use it. The talk was perfectly comprehensible and quite enlightening though, so my silly bit of attitude was quite misplaced. I may even end up using some of what I learned in it.

I know very little about C++17, but I attended a talk about it this morning and the syntax for destructuring bind caught my attention.

This is a feature widely supported in other languages, where you assign a complex type to another complex declaration with individual names in it that match the original type, and you can then refer individually to the values that were assigned.

It works regardless of whether the source is a structure, array, tuple, pair, etc.

What is interesting about it, in C++, is that it appears the source structure is always indexed by declaration order, rather than by name. That is, if you write

struct { int a; int b; } x { 1, 2 };
auto [b, a] = x;

then b will be 1 and a will be 2, even though in the original structure b was 2 and a was 1.

In other languages, a destructuring bind of a structure with named fields is performed using matching by name rather than by index. (See the SML example above.)

This highlights something that has been building for a while about C++. Since C++11 introduced the structure initialisation syntax in which you just list structure values one by one, we have increasingly accepted referring to structure elements by declaration order rather than by name. Someone who swapped two structure elements of the same type could break an awful lot of code without the compiler noticing. This doesn’t feel very safe, for a supposedly type-safe (ish) language.

And it isn’t the way other languages work. I don’t know any other language that will happily destructure a named structure by index rather than name, or even construct one (even the structure initialisers in C, since C99, are safer).

I’d love to know whether this has affected many people in practice, or whether I’m just being a bit suspicious.

I read two quite different articles about programming in academia today.

I don’t know Yossi Kreinin, and when his piece Why bad scientific code beats code following “best practices” appeared on the Hacker News front page, I guessed that I probably wouldn’t agree with it. I’m a programmer working in academia who has spent some time trying to find ways to improve the code that researchers write, and I don’t want to be told I’m wasting my time.

But on the whole I agreed with him. A totally naive programmer is going to produce messy, organic, but basically linear code that will usually be easier to understand and work with than the code of someone who has learned a bit of Java and wants to put everything in a factory class. The part I don’t agree with of course, and that I suspect he put in just for the sake of the headline, is that these really are best practices.

I think that one of the hidden goals of a project like Software Carpentry is to teach that the reason software developers appear to be “too clever”, and somehow unreachable for the scientist outside the software field, is that they are being too clever. Programming gets over-complicated; you can learn to write good code (that is, readable code) more easily than you can learn to write bad code the professional programmers’ way.

I also identified with Yossi’s line that “I claim to have repented, mostly”. Most of the code I’ve written in my career is not very good, by this standard. It’s a long path to enlightenment.

A computing degree is an odd thing. Computer science is the theory of how computers and programs work. Computing, as a subject, is computer science plus some stuff about how we should actually program them in order to get a job done. The two are very different.

Christophe breaks down objectives of a computing degree: Think, experiment, job, career, study, society. I’m not very familiar with the study objective, which refers to postgraduate study in a computing department (something I never did). Think refers to teaching students how to think and solve problems computationally. I think he may be missing a step, and it may be useful to separate thinking about how the computer works (“understand”?) from thinking about how the programmer can work.

There is also, of course, the question of how to avoid making your programmer feel too clever.

As an undergraduate in 1990-94, I was taught, in this order, Prolog, C, ML, 68k assembly language, and C++. I also learned some Lisp, though I can’t remember being formally taught it. Prolog, C, and the assembly language were all good bases for what I referred to as the understand objective, getting something out of the history of computing and learning about how computers work. ML was a wonderful introduction to thinking, and it’s no coincidence that I’ve recently been programming in an ML variant as an engaging alternative to work.

The hard one to evaluate is C++. It was a very poor teaching language for object-oriented programming, which is a pity because at the time we learned it, I didn’t get object-oriented programming at all. And we learned nothing about any other kind of programming from it, having already been taught three different high-level languages. So it contributed very poorly to the think objective and not at all to the understand one. It’s an awful language to learn to write clear, reliable code in, therefore bad from the society perspective, and you can (as I have) spend 20 years learning to write it, which is obviously ridiculous, hence you would think also bad from the job perspective.

But it turns out that C++ has been the most valuable job language there could be, because (a) it is resiliently portable: it turns out that write-once-run-anywhere with a virtual machine comes and goes in waves, depending on the whim of the top operating system provider of the time, but compiling to machine code seems to be eternal; (b) it is just about able to ape a number of programming paradigms, so you can get away with adopting a style without adopting another language; and (c) its complexity means that it looks good on your CV. I honestly wish, as a 20+-year C++ programmer, that we could make it so that nobody ever had to learn C++ again, but even now I don’t think that is the case.

The one goal completely unaddressed by my own degree, and almost every language I’ve learned since, is experiment. I think there are two essentials for this: a responsive interactive interpreter, and visual responsiveness, like a graphical scene environment or plotting tools. Most of the things you want to do here are probably growing up in Javascript and HTML5.

I don’t really know anything about teaching, about the actual on-the-ground business of making people learn stuff. So you shouldn’t listen to me on this next bit, I’m just daydreaming. But if I were planning a 3-year computing degree course in my head now, I think I would aim to teach, in this order:

Python, for the basics of procedural computing. It’s the cleanest language for doing satisfying simple loops and input/output transformations, and is a sound general-purpose language.

Clojure. I’ve decided now that I don’t so much care for Lisp syntax day-to-day, but a Lisp gives you so much to talk about and investigate without getting lost in the specific requirements of the language. And a Lisp on the JVM gives you more depth: advanced students could learn quite a lot about Java without ever actually being taught Java.

Some assembly language, probably ARM and preferably with a nice visible bit of circuit board on hand.

Javascript, but not aiming to teach the language so much as using a specific interactive framework and with a specific small game-development project to complete. I would probably also use Typescript rather than untyped Javascript.

Haskell. As an ML guy it was always my enemy, but Haskell is the functional language that has endured. It’s a follow-on course from Lisp.

C++. Because, as far as I can see at the moment, you pretty much have to. But please, give them modern-style pointer ownership and RAII (i.e. avoiding explicit heap allocation).

Python again, in a closing course that taught people how best to do things in an actual working environment. Testing, not being too much of a smartarse, etc.

But the odd thing about that set of languages is that, just as with my own degree, you never get a very good dedicated object-oriented language. Maybe Objective-C could replace C++; it’s probably a clearer pedagogical object language, but C++ is everywhere while Objective-C is effectively platform-specific, even if it is a very popular platform.

And be sure to teach them version control.

Oh, and don’t forget to add a double-entry book-keeping course. It’s probably more useful than the programming stuff.

Although there was nothing very deep about this change or its causes, I found it interesting partly because I had used a partly test-driven process to evolve the original API and I felt there may be a connection between the process and any resulting problems. Here are a few thoughts prompted by this change.

Passing the tests is not enough

Test-driven development is a satisfying and welcome prop. It allows you to reframe difficult questions of algorithm design in terms of easier questions about what an algorithm should produce.

But producing the right results in every test case you can think of is not enough. It’s possible to exercise almost the whole of your implementation in terms of static coverage, yet still have the wrong API.

In other words, it may be just as easy to overfit the API to the test cases as it is to overfit the test cases to the implementation.

Unit testing may be easier than API design

So, designing a good API is harder than writing tests for it. But to rephrase that more encouragingly: writing tests is easier than designing the API.

If, like me, you’re used to thinking of unit testing as requiring more effort than “just bunging together an API”, this should be a worthwhile corrective in both directions.

API design is harder than you think, but unit testing is easier. Having unit tests doesn’t make it any harder to change the API, either: maintaining tests during redesign is seldom difficult, and having tests helps to ensure the logic doesn’t get broken.

Types are not just annoying artifacts of the programming language

An unfortunate consequence of having worked with data representation systems like RDF mostly in the context of Web backends and scripting languages is that it leads to a tendency to treat everything as “just a string”.

This is fine if your string has enough syntax to be able to distinguish types properly by parsing it—for example, if you represent RDF using Turtle and query it using SPARQL.

But if you break down your data model into individual node components while continuing to represent those as untyped strings, you’re going to be in trouble. You can’t get away without understanding, and somewhere making explicit, the underlying type model.

Predictability contributes to simplicity

A simpler API is not necessarily one that leads to fewer or shorter lines of code. It’s one that leads to less confusion and more certainty, and carrying around type information helps, just as precondition testing and fail-fast principles can.

It’s probably still wrong

I’ve effectively found and fixed a bug, one that happened to be in the API rather than the implementation. But there are probably still many remaining. I need a broader population of software using the library before I can be really confident that the API works.

Of course it’s not unusual to see significant API holes in 1.0 releases of a library, and to get them tightened up for 2.0. It’s not the end of the world. But it ought to be easier and cheaper to fix these things earlier rather than later.